This year, botrytis has again woven its magic for Andrew Hedley.
Growing up in England as a medium-paced bowler, capturing eight-wicket bags, Andrew Hedley yearned to play professional cricket. Now he’s bowling wine lovers over with 
his ravishingly beautiful, unabashedly sweet Marlborough rieslings.
Sweet wines account for 0.1% of our consumption. Riesling, however, is Hedley’s favourite variety and the key grape for New Zealand’s sweet wines, yielding gorgeously perfumed wines with concentrated varietal flavours to which “noble rot”, the desirable form of Botrytis cinerea, adds a honeyed, apricot-like richness.
Hedley recalls his parents were “not wine connoisseurs, but my father, a design engineer, used to visit Trier, on the Mosel, on business, and we would often open a bottle of wine at home on Sundays”. Later, at university, Hedley visited southern Germany on a language course. “A wine festival was on and we did lots of tasting. Little things like that intensify your interest, and then I started reading about wine …”
After earning a PhD in synthetic organic chemistry from the University of Northumbria at Newcastle, Hedley worked at the Rapaura Vintners contract winemaking facility in Marlborough. In 2002, he took over the top production job at the Framingham winery, near Renwick.
Framingham’s founders, Rex and Paula Brooke-Taylor, planted their first vines in 1982. For many years, they sold their grapes for acclaimed rieslings from Corbans, Dry River and Grove Mill.
Framingham is now part of the Sogrape empire, a Portuguese family business with one of the world’s most famous brands, Mateus Rosé, and interests in Portugal, Spain and Argentina. But those riesling vines are now approaching 30 years old, giving Hedley the perfect platform from which to launch this country’s most absorbing collection of sweet whites.
New Zealand’s most luscious sweet wines are made from late-harvested, botrytis-infected fruit. Misty mornings, followed by fine, clear days with light winds and low humidity, are ideal conditions for the spread of noble rot.
One prerequisite is that the fruit must be healthy and ripe before the onset of botrytis, so that the mould is concentrating fully ripe flavours. The fungus, which forms a fluffy coating over the berries, transforms their contents by thrusting tiny filaments through the grape skins and feeding on the interior. Through dehydration the grape sugars and extractives become highly concentrated – perfect for making sweet wine.
“Low in alcohol and very Germanic” is Hedley’s description of his wines’ style, of which several are so rare that fewer than 400 bottles exist. In 2008, he was forced to borrow micro-vinification equipment. This year, with botrytis again weaving its magic, he produced nine sweet wines, not all from riesling.
“We didn’t make them to make money,” Hedley stresses. “We made them because we could.” Those marketed under Framingham’s rare F-Series label are not necessarily better than its mainstream wines – just different.
Framingham F-Series Riesling Trockenbeerenauslese 2011
Hand-picked between May 19 and 24 at 40.7 brix (concentration of grape sugars), when all berries were botrytis-affected and dried out. Golden, with nectareous scents and flavours, sweet (295g/litre of residual sugar), rich, pure and lasting. $60 (375ml)
Framingham Noble Riesling 2011
Hand-harvested at 31.8 brix in five picks from April 12 to May 23, with 50-60% botrytis. Lush, oily and sweet (180g/litre of residual sugar), with deliciously deep peach, lemon, lime and marmalade flavours. $40 (375ml)
Framingham Select Riesling 2011
Hand-harvested on April 1 at 22.1 brix, representing a spatlese (late-harvest) style. Full-bodied (although only 8.5% alcohol), with rich, ripe citrus and stonefruit flavours, showing lovely delicacy, freshness and harmony (65g/litre of residual sugar). $40 (750ml)
Framingham F-Series Riesling Kabinett 2011
Hand-picked on March 20 at 20.4 brix. Light (8% alcohol), with pure, delicate lemon and lime flavours showing good intensity, gentle sweetness (58g/litre of residual sugar) and a tight finish. Very ageworthy. $40 (750ml)